ORNL's plutonium waste to be shipped west

Oak Ridge contractors are in the preparatory stages of a two-year project that will get rid of 170 containers of so-called transuranic waste from Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Solid Waste Storage Area No. 5 … including 26 containers that reportedly contain significant quantities of plutonium.

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By The Associated Press

Oakridger - Oak Ridge, TN

By The Associated Press

Posted Sep. 18, 2013 at 11:00 AM

By The Associated Press
Posted Sep. 18, 2013 at 11:00 AM

Oak Ridge contractors are in the preparatory stages of a two-year project that will get rid of 170 containers of so-called transuranic waste from Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Solid Waste Storage Area No. 5 … including 26 containers that reportedly contain significant quantities of plutonium.

U.S. Department of Energy spokesman Mike Koentop declined to specify the amount of radioactive plutonium stored at SWSA-5, though a couple of officials have privately expressed concern about the level of security at the site where fissile materials of potential use in weapons are housed.

“I can’t be more specific on the quantity,” Koentop said.

According to DOE, the project will “retrieve and process” the containers of radioactive waste — including 26 containers of “high-fissile waste” — for disposal at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. Koentop confirmed that the fissionable waste contains plutonium.

“This activity is part of the ongoing transfer and processing of transuranic waste to meet milestones established with the state of Tennessee,” Koentop said in an email response to questions.

Currently, the waste stored at ORNL is managed by URS-CH2M Oak Ridge (UCOR), DOE’s cleanup manager in Oak Ridge. UCOR plans to retrieve the containers from underground storage, some of them reportedly in concrete vaults, and will deliver them to Wastren Advantage Inc., operating contractor at DOE’s Transuranic Waste Processing Center in Oak Ridge.

WAI will process and repackage the waste for shipment to New Mexico, Koentop said.

“WAI is currently performing facility upgrades (at the waste-processing center) and preparing for readiness reviews, which will allow them to process the waste beginning in 2014,” the DOE spokesman said.

According to a June memo by staff of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, the 26 containers of plutonium-bearing materials were declared waste in the mid-1980s and have been stored since then.

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B&W Y-12, a partnership of Babcock & Wilcox Technical Services and Bechtel National, took over management of the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge in late 2000. Since then, the contract has been extended many times, most of them occurring in recent years while the government worked out a plan to consolidate the Y-12 management contract with another nuclear weapons facility — the Pantex warhead assembly/disassembly plant in Texas.

According to National Nuclear Security Administration spokesman Steven Wyatt, there have been a dozen contract extensions at Y-12.

“The first one occurred in 2005 (for five years), with all the rest occurring over the past three years,” Wyatt said.

The most recent extension came mid-summer and extends the Y-12 contract through the end of September.

A similar extension was made of the contract at Pantex, as NNSA continues to work toward a solution on the $22 billion Y-12/Pantex contract.

Page 2 of 2 - The contract was awarded in January to a partnership of Bechtel National and Lockheed Martin — but has been under protest since then.